The 2022 Volvo C40 Recharge is an all-electric crossover coupe from Volvo that has a new Android-based infotainment system. We take a look at the minimalist setup and touch on some of the pros and cons of daily use, including its sneaky-good digital owner's manual.
TranscriptBYRON HURD: Hello, everybody. It's Byron and welcome to the interior of the 2022 Volvo C40 Recharge. This is an electric compact hatchback crossover thing. As you can see, I've been using it as such.
And we're going to look a little bit at the infotainment system today. This is the new Google-based infotainment system that Volvo is rolling out. And as you can see, we've got some familiar Google elements here already. You've got Google Maps up there at the top, you've got the Play Store down here. Yes, it has an actual Google Play store. Not just their own individually side-branded app store that only lets you do certain things. However, I'll caution you that you can only use apps that are actually compatible with the car. You can't just download anything you want.
And all in all, this is a fairly clean and well-executed interior. The tech is obviously the showpiece here. We've got this Google-style interface in the cluster. And what you get over here, it's otherwise fairly spartan. It's a little more on the IKEA end. But of course, this is an EV. They're trying to save weight where they can. So a lot of the functionality gets baked into the touch screen.
The nice thing is there is still a good old fashioned volume knob here, which I've turned off, helpfully, for us. The HVAC and everything is controlled through this climate section of the touch screen, which is a bit unfortunate. But again, something we've seen carry over from Volvo, so no real surprise there.
Basic functionality here is to be the same as what you're used to with previous Volvo systems. That's the home button. This is the extent of our home screen right now. You can manipulate these individual tiles but so far, these are the only ones that we actually have on the home screen. There's a dropdown here for notifications, status indicators, all that kind of stuff.
If you're used to-- well, say-- an Android smartphone, this is going to work fairly similarly. We've got the app screen down here. And this brings up what we've got. You can see individual stripes again. And if you have more apps than fit into each one of the bands, there's a little dropdown that appears for you to add to it.
From here you also get the owner's manual, which is something I'd like to call out, just because it is very nice having a Google-powered owner's manual. You can see I've searched for regenerative braking earlier. I was looking for a way to turn off one pedal driving. And I found it very quickly by searching for region, and gave me this little screen here that tells me exactly what to do. And this is a lot easier to browse and, obviously, much easier to search than an actual physical owner's manual, which this car didn't come with, not necessarily because Volvo doesn't include one, but just because, frequently, we don't get them when we get these loaner vehicles.
So it's nice being able to search through this. In fact, the keywords that you can search for in this are much more intuitive than the terms you would look for in the appendix or index of a physical copy of the owner's manual. It makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for.
And that's kind of the general consensus for the rest of this. It's a very simple layout. Yeah, we've got the one knob, which is kind of a bummer, and just very few buttons down here. It's all in the screen. But fortunately, the screen does work pretty well and integrates nicely with the rest of the interior.
Again, the cluster is very nice and everything on here really kind of just fades away when you're not using it, quite literally, in the case of the cluster, where you can dismiss the entire cluster screen if you just don't want to have anything there. It's quite nice. It's neat. It's tidy. It's very Volvo. We're impressed.
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